The larger question is why we allow the chemical industry — by spending $100,000 on lobbying per member of Congress — to buy its way out of effective regulation of endocrine disruptors. The industry’s deceit marks a replay of Big Tobacco’s battle against regulation of smoking.

Lobbyists are a pillar of our dysfunctional political system. They make money no matter what. Their interests are still going to get their way no matter who is in power.

They represent the business of keeping business in business.

Things won’t get better until we cut off the flow of money into politics.

In dozens of private receptions, behind a scrim of barricades and police officers, they inspected their party’s new Trump faction with curiosity and hope. There were spheres of influence to carve out. There was money to raise and money to be made, whether or not Mr. Trump ended up in the White House.

Its outrageous how the money flows around Washington. Its amazing how little our politicians do for the People. Its inevitable that they serve only two purposes; get re-elected and then payback the lobbyists and campaign funders who got them re-elected.

We have got to take the money out of campaigns. We have got to get rid of PACs and backdoor gift giving and campaign funding.

This is a fine example of what’s wrong with politics and the idea that a free market system is an ideal situation for business.

Lobbyists for the medical device industry and their conservative stooges would have us believe that a tax on medical devices is unfair and would inhibit innovation. They spent a lot of money getting their political henchmen to bring our government to a standstill over what is nothing but an attempt to legislate a business advantage for them. An advantage which is particularly anticompetitive.

Not only can the medical-device industry easily afford the tax without compromising innovation, but the industry’s enormous profits are a result of anticompetitive practices that themselves drive up medical-device costs unnecessarily. The tax is a distraction from reforms to the industry that are urgently needed to lower health care costs.

The medical-device industry faces virtually no price competition. Because of confidentiality agreements that manufacturers require hospitals to sign, the prices of the devices are cloaked in secrecy.

Competitive pressures from public and private payers would provide incentives for the industry to become more innovative, producing technologies that actually lowered costs and offered truly advanced breakthroughs.

This article shows the depth of the dysfunction in our electoral process. It points to the outsized power business interest lobbyists have in Congress.

After the 2010 elections, the Chamber and other business interests funneled millions of dollars into Republican redistricting efforts around the country, helping draw overwhelmingly safe Republican districts whose occupants — many among the most conservative House members — are now far less vulnerable to challenges from more moderate Republicans.

The staff here finds a perverse sort of enjoyment in the idea that an entrenched, but fundamentally broken system can be upset by a small band of elected misfits. There is certainly something good about politicians not bowing to their corporate overlords. It’s the context of holding the entire governmental process and the country itself hostage in the process that rankles the staff. We would prefer to see fundamental change that makes the government more fairly representative of its constituents, not its special interests.

Moreover, business leaders and trade groups said, the tools that have served them in the past — campaign contributions, large memberships across the country, a multibillion-dollar lobbying apparatus — do not seem to be working.

They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.